New Features

Feature

Description

Approximate Queue Message Count

You can get an approximate count of the number of messages in an Amazon SQS queue. This allows you to monitor your queues and write software to automatically react to queues that are too large or too small. It is important to note that because of the distributed architecture of SQS we do not have an exact count of the number of messages in a queue; this value is our best guess. In most cases it should be close to the actual number of messages in the queue, but you should not rely on the count being precise. See the GetQueueAttributes topic in the documentation for more detail.

Change Message Visibility Timeout

You can change the visibility timeout of a message. If a message consumer needs more time to process a message, it can extend the message's visibility timeout. Conversely, if a consumer wants to release the message to be processed by another consumer it can set the visibility timeout to zero and the message will immediately become visible. See the ChangeMessageVisibility topic in the documentation for more detail.

Delete Queues Containing Messages

You can choose to delete all messages from a queue when you delete the queue. This means that if you have a queue you want to eliminate and you do not care about the messages in it, you no longer need to delete each message separately before deleting the queue. See the DeleteQueue topic in the documentation for more detail.

Delimiters in Queue Names

You can use the hyphen (-) and underscore (_) characters in the names of queues. If you are trying to combine multiple strings into your queue name, you can use these characters as delimiters between the different parts of your queue name.

Query Support for Large Messages

In the past, users of the HTTP Query interface for Amazon SQS could not send messages larger than 8 KB. You can now send messages up to 256 KB through this interface by including the message's contents in the body of the HTTP request. See the SendMessage topic in the documentation for more detail.

As of the 2007-05-01 version, the SetVisibilityTimeout and GetVisibilityTimeout actions have been deprecated in favor of new actions called SetQueueAttributes and GetQueueAttributes. Although the original actions are currently still supported, we encourage you to update your system to use the new actions instead. See the SetQueueAttributes and GetQueueAttributes topics in the documentation for more detail.

Improved Documentation

We have reorganized and improved the documentation for SQS. We have added new sections explaining how SQS's distributed queues work.